The Natural History of the New World

Excerpted from the Maclean's review of The Codex Canadensis and the Writings of Louis Nicolas: The Natural History of the New World, Histoire Naturelle des Indes Occidentales edited and with an introduction by François-Marc Gagnon, with Nancy Senior and Réal Ouellet.

This eye-popping manuscript represents an attempt by a 17th-century French Jesuit, Louis Nicolas, to capture the life of the New World—flora, fauna and human—in writings and 180 pen illustrations (often watercoloured) of plants, fish, birds and 15 individuals, mostly tattooed and pipe-smoking, from woodland First Nations communities. Most of the illustrations are identifiably realistic, especially the birds and plants, and some—notably the unicorn—are not, but they are all part of a pre-modern European’s attempt to come to grips with the strangeness of North America.

The history of the manuscript is as mysterious as its author’s imagination. It was already 250 years old when it first emerged in 1930, entirely without provenance, in the possession of a Parisian bookseller. Within four years it disappeared again, not to re-emerge until 1949 when it was bought by Thomas Gilcrease, an eccentric Oklahoma oilman with a mania for collecting Americana.